Topic Overhaul
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In Response to Clonkonaut
I feel like that in retrospect, OGRE maybe wasn't the best choice for the 3D graphics. Although I cannot offer a better one since I haven't done any extended research into possible alternatives.
We heavily underused the engine by having it just render single models into a 2D environment when it is intended to provide full 3D realtime scene renderings. Which also meant that options the engine could provide potentially crashed OC or lead to the models simply not displaying. We also spent years to tie the different graphic engines together and ended up with Frankenstein's graphics; a 2D landscape, 2D sprite graphics (sometimes with bump maps), 3D models rendered outside the game and being inserted and on top of all that a basic lighting and shader system that always tried to give everything a somewhat not-Frankenstein look. It never really worked and the whole game looked mashed together, with frequent errors in lighting, shadows and fog of war. I do think this hurt the game as new players always got the 'it is still a bit rough and weird' feeling.
A complete overhaul might just commit to a fully 3D environment (or revert back into a fully 2D one). If the landscape and all the objects are done by the same engine, lighting problems are probably less bad, writing shaders to really tie things together becomes easier and certain features will not have to be coded multiple times for different systems.
Maybe OGRE would still be okay in that case. What we also failed to realise is that OGRE did not give us the support we had hoped. We had hoped that by using a semi-popular engine, we get all the modelling workflow for free. We did not, however. While it looked promising in the beginning that one could download an export plugin for Blender, this was false hope. It seems that OGRE is less interested in providing what we needed: a simple 3D model format that people can quickly craft, export and use in a game. We only ever had this one, fairly broken Blender exporter and we still had to manually edit the models afterwards, to remove all the features that OC does not support (or you as the designer are presented with lots of warnings when firing up OC). In order to properly use OGRE, you will probably have to first define your workflow and write all the necessary plugins for 3d modelling software yourself. We failed to do that and therefore over the years many 3d artists we had became very frustrated. We could not tell them how to do the models, what polygon counts, how to rig the models, how to animate or even what Blender features to stay away from as they will crash the exporter, crash OC or simply not work. It is impossible to use a proper set of predefined materials in your 3d models and thus every new artist was confronted with the task of tediously creating textures with little to no guidance in what to do or even what colours to use. The .material files are mostly filled with unused values because OC somehow invents its own way of doing materials.
OGRE is certainly a powerful tool that we never used. We do not have the proper toolset to offer. Maybe there is an alternative that provides what we needed: a simple way for 3d artists to create models and have them display in the game without hours of redoing because they clicked the wrong button in Blender (not that we still have 3d artists left at all).
We heavily underused the engine by having it just render single models into a 2D environment when it is intended to provide full 3D realtime scene renderings. Which also meant that options the engine could provide potentially crashed OC or lead to the models simply not displaying. We also spent years to tie the different graphic engines together and ended up with Frankenstein's graphics; a 2D landscape, 2D sprite graphics (sometimes with bump maps), 3D models rendered outside the game and being inserted and on top of all that a basic lighting and shader system that always tried to give everything a somewhat not-Frankenstein look. It never really worked and the whole game looked mashed together, with frequent errors in lighting, shadows and fog of war. I do think this hurt the game as new players always got the 'it is still a bit rough and weird' feeling.
A complete overhaul might just commit to a fully 3D environment (or revert back into a fully 2D one). If the landscape and all the objects are done by the same engine, lighting problems are probably less bad, writing shaders to really tie things together becomes easier and certain features will not have to be coded multiple times for different systems.
Maybe OGRE would still be okay in that case. What we also failed to realise is that OGRE did not give us the support we had hoped. We had hoped that by using a semi-popular engine, we get all the modelling workflow for free. We did not, however. While it looked promising in the beginning that one could download an export plugin for Blender, this was false hope. It seems that OGRE is less interested in providing what we needed: a simple 3D model format that people can quickly craft, export and use in a game. We only ever had this one, fairly broken Blender exporter and we still had to manually edit the models afterwards, to remove all the features that OC does not support (or you as the designer are presented with lots of warnings when firing up OC). In order to properly use OGRE, you will probably have to first define your workflow and write all the necessary plugins for 3d modelling software yourself. We failed to do that and therefore over the years many 3d artists we had became very frustrated. We could not tell them how to do the models, what polygon counts, how to rig the models, how to animate or even what Blender features to stay away from as they will crash the exporter, crash OC or simply not work. It is impossible to use a proper set of predefined materials in your 3d models and thus every new artist was confronted with the task of tediously creating textures with little to no guidance in what to do or even what colours to use. The .material files are mostly filled with unused values because OC somehow invents its own way of doing materials.
OGRE is certainly a powerful tool that we never used. We do not have the proper toolset to offer. Maybe there is an alternative that provides what we needed: a simple way for 3d artists to create models and have them display in the game without hours of redoing because they clicked the wrong button in Blender (not that we still have 3d artists left at all).
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